Brad Costanzo 🥓 Bacon Wrapped Hustle #1

All right, so since we are combining podcasts for today, Little Bacon Wrapped Hustle or Hustle Wrapped Bacon business.

Yeah, sure.

You guys always bring yours in with a little beatbox and wrap, and I always bring in mine with the sound of sizzling bacon. So I'm gonna start off with.

It.

Is.

What'S up, everybody? Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Hustle. Ah, that's the whole intro.

That's.

So we figured we'd do this. You know, Brad's got a podcast. It's pretty good.

I mean, if you like that kind of thing.

We've got a podcast. So his is Bacon Wrapped business. We've got a podcast Hustle and Flowchart. We figured let's from time to time do a Bacon Wrapped Hustle and I'll kind of talk about what we've learned over the month. It'll be like, what, once a month thing? Maybe once every six weeks or so.

Once a month sounds good. How about the start?

Not daily.

Not daily.

Not daily. Not daily.

By the way, for anybody who's not watching this on the video, this is a special video episode. So we are recording this right now. And if you're just listening on itunes or Android or whatever the hell Android people listen to it on Stitcher, then we'll put a link to the video in the show notes.

Sounds good. Sounds good. And that'll be posted on what your site posted in places. It'll be all over the web.

You probably won't have a hard time finding it if you went to one of our sites.

That's true.

So the one thing I want to make promises to these people is that if you watch this at the end of the show, Joe is definitely taking his shirt off.

Oh, wow. Whoa.

We got to get.

I've always heard, really excited.

I've always heard that when you're doing. When you're doing long episodes like this, you got to give people a reason to stick to the end.

Okay, that's it. Just wait and then keep waiting longer. If you don't see it by the end of the video. Just keep waiting.

Yes.

And it'll maybe show up.

Well, what they don't know is none of us are wearing pants.

That's true.

Welcome to the pantsless podcast.

Why don't we just make the video?

So quick intros.

Yes.

I'm Brad Costanzo. My podcast is Bacon wrap Business. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits.

Hey, now.

I am a consultant. I'm an entrepreneur. I buy businesses. I work with a variety of types of businesses and Helping them to grow, get unstuck, find clarity, and using multiple traffic conversion strategies and whatnot. And you guys introduced yourself to my audience.

For one, you were like, you've been.

On my show before.

You were like the Uber connector. So if you don't know Mr. Bradley, go follow him because he will.

You're gonna say something else.

Well, if that's your kind of thing, that's cool too.

Go F him.

I'm Joe Fear. Matt Wolf over here, co host of We're Evergreen Profits and also have a podcast called Hustle and Flowchart, hence the name. And yeah, so we talk to a whole bunch of business owners, authors, investors, traffic ninjas, all that cool stuff to help you basically work less, make more, but think a little differently in the process.

Now, what a lot of people don't know is that we recently all went into business together on an acquisition. We acquired a. We acquired a new business that we are, I guess, rehabbing.

It's a rehab. Yeah, yeah. Great business surgery and sometimes.

Yes. Tons of opportunity though. And so we started off as friends, we became business partners and hopefully it stops there with the relationship. There's only one other place you can go.

Yeah. And that's not your way.

So when we did our last couple podcasts, we were on your show, you were on our show. We weren't in business together yet, were we?

No, I don't think so.

No. Just learn around ideas of.

This was about a year ago almost. Yeah, to the day. Like about 11 months ago, you guys were on my show and it probably took six months to come out.

Yeah, no, we have. We're like, dude, come on.

It was so good. I was saying.

But yeah, no, we talked about owning businesses, being advisors, taking equity or rev share part of a company, and we made it happen. Albeit it's kind of us still running the company, but we're learning and it's probably been one of the best learning experiences we've had had all three of us in different ways probably.

It's a great, it's kind of a great training reels opportunity for us because I mean, we've all got our own businesses, we all have run those and we've done more startups from the ground floor. But this is the first time we've really ever. I think this is the first time we've taken over an existing business and I, I really enjoy it. And as listeners of my podcast will know, I, you know, I done a lot of episodes with people who've bought businesses and sold businesses, but especially buying ones. Because I'm being. Become a big believer that it's a lot easier to buy one than it is to build one. And. But I've got to admit, there's a lot of. There's a big learning curve and you get in and it's almost like, all right, here you go. Now what are you going to do with it? It's like, oh, wow. I actually have to figure out where all the bodies are buried and all the little moving parts kind of keep it going. And all of us are very busy and we don't have time to just devote like, hey, let's just work on this. Because it's not a big enough business to just get full. All of our.

Yeah, no, it's. It's been a good exercise in. Okay, we've each got businesses now there's this other piece in here. How do we scale a business without us being involved on a day to day basis? We're having to figure that out as we go because we don't have time to be involved, all of us, on a day to day basis because we've got other shit to run.

Yeah. And that's, that's. The thing is like, I feel like we've all bought things at a smaller level. So like we bought some courses on Udemy from product owners out there, basically rebranded it and then launched it. That was cool. That was like 500 bucks at a time, you know. But it's a creative way to get a head start in something. And that's a great way. Still, like it's. You gotta vet the product as you would with any business you buy. You vet it financials. Is the market there, there's improve.

No, that's a great point. I mean, the, the point of. If you think of acquiring a business as some insane monument, monumental thing. Well, it can be, obviously, but. But one of the quickest ways to get your feet wet is do what we did. Go and find somebody who's selling a course on Udemy. They're probably not that invested into it. They're probably, probably got another day job. They've got other stuff going on the side. They set up a Udemy course as a side hustle. If somebody comes along and says, look, I'm gonna give you a thousand bucks for your course. They've probably made a thousand bucks total on the entire time they've been on Udemy.

Well, Udemy's screwing them anyway, so yeah, they're desperate for some cash.

Right.

And I forgot to mention this Episode sponsored by Udemy.com.

Screw you Udemy, please screw Udem. No, it's funny. We actually have courses on Udemy ourselves, and I think we get like $3 PayPal commissions like once a month legitimately.

Yeah.

Pretty awesome.

There's a lot of reasons why Udemy is screwing their product owners, but there's a lot of good talent on there, so.

Absolutely. Well, and one of the things you bring up is a big believer as well, is like, people don't have to buy business. You can buy assets.

That's what that is. Yeah.

Can you borrow it? Can you buy it as opposed to building it? And.

People who listen to my show know that I talk about the. These two words quite a bit, and I try to put a lot of these under this umbrella of access and influence. So access being, you know, access, like, what do you have access to? Do you have access to customers? Do you have access to product or content or distribution channels or capital, etc. And there's a big difference between access and ownership. If you don't have to own it, if you can access it. Right. So therefore, a lot of people are familiar with doing joint ventures and affiliate partnerships. That's me accessing your. Your audience without having to own it. But at the same time, like, act like access can mean, can I buy it? So can I. You've got. If you're a Udemy author and you've got a great piece of content and you're not really, you know, doing a great job, how can I access that? Well, there's a couple ways I can go out and just give you money for it. Buy it, you. You go away and it's mine. Or I can license it. I can pay you a fee to just utilize it over here in a totally different way. You can keep selling it on your own, but I just want to sell it over here in a different way. And there's probably a number of other ways to access that as opposed to building it from scratch. And I think, I wish I would have known a lot of these strategies when I was first starting off, because I think it would have shortened the learning curve.

For sure it would.

And the implementation curve going, oh, man, I got to build this.

Well, think like you're approaching it with your own skill sets that you have, like marketing, for instance. A lot of people listening are marketers or they know how to drive traffic, traffic conversion, email, whatever. These people are usually just knowledge folks. Like, they are, you know, creating something on, sleep on how to code some. Whatever topic. So they might want to partner, you know, and. And we've done that before too, where we are the marketing arm or advisors and they're just supplying all the knowledge, all the content, and then that's one less thing you have to worry about. You're just like, I'm going to be really freaking good at what I do. Yeah.

I mean, really, to be honest, we've built a business over the last couple years around to not even having our own product for the longest time.

Right.

You know, we've been affiliates because what our, I don't know, would you call it access, influence? I don't know which one it would fall under. But we're really good at running paid traffic. Right. We've gotten some, some stuff down where we really know what we're doing when it comes to media buying and paid traffic. And so that was sort of our leverage point. We can go find other products where we're like, this is a really good product. We like this. We think we can sell this and then use our existing knowledge of media buying to ramp up those products for people.

Yeah. Bingo. And, you know, access and influence in a lot of ways, you know, we're, you know, we're big fans of the whole Perry Marshall 8020 Tactical Triangle. And some people have seen that. If not, we'll put a link to it or something like that somewhere to find it. But it's. There's three real components to any of these businesses, especially from a marketing angle, which is the traffic, the conversion, and the economics of it. Right. So access to me is almost the traffic.

Yeah, right. I would say so.

I wouldn't say that this is a perfectly. A perfect metaphor, but influence is the conversion. Can I influence you to purchase it? How can I access the people who need what I've got and then can I, can I influence them to make the purchase? Obviously the economics in there is one of the pieces that holds it all together. Can I do it cost effectively, don't go broke?

I make money? Can I reinvest it? Can I scale all that?

Right. And that's one of the areas where I screwed up when I, A couple of years ago, I started a coffee, a private label coffee brand. And I was really excited.

And I was really excited about the.

The brand and the messaging and everything that we could do. And I knew I could get in front of people who like to drink coffee, especially women who like to drink coffee. But I completely neglected and violated my own rules. The economics of the thing I couldn't find, though, I couldn't get access to those people and influence them to Buy at a rate, you know, cost per.

Acquisition, expensive coffee, or you have to do a lot of volume.

Absolutely.

So that was a big thing, is the profit margin.

Profit margins were just way too low. And I wouldn't neglect, you know, I kind of had blinders on. I was delusionally optimistic, and I kind of knew that I was violating a lot of the rules that I should set forth. But I got kind of swept up in the passion of it all and the excitement. And I just, as I said, I was delusionally optimistic, which I think is important as an entrepreneur. You gotta think, I'm gonna make this work. I'm gonna figure it out, even though I don't know how.

Sure. And I think that's a common question that we receive all the time, are like, hey, I have this opportunity or this thing, or I could do affiliate marketing or I can make my own products. What do I do first? Yeah, I literally, I think I answered this question last night in one of our groups and I'm like, all right, there's no perfect answer. We can't see into the future. We don't have a freaking crystal ball. We can try to lie to you, but we're not. But, like, you know, there's at least everything that we've kind of done is like, there's a now either business or thing of focus that can bring in the revenue now to pay the bills, to gain experience, make the connection, the access, all that stuff. But maybe there's something you have access to now that you can do. But then there's a future business. Maybe it's six months off or a year off that you can slowly start to build in the background or on some, you know, a few hours here a week, not a full time focus. And it kind of helps. And that's kind of more or less what we're doing with our homebrew site. Yeah, it's kind of like that.

Absolutely. I mean, you have to kind of explore and check out new opportunities. And, you know, on my podcast, I've been doing this thing called Wednesday Wisdom W I S U M P where it's like, it's half wise, it's half dumb, but it's these success platitudes. And it kind of made me think of one which is just that, you know, pick one thing and focus.

Yeah, right.

That's. To a degree, yes. And if you've got that one thing where you feel extremely focused about, that's fine. But a lot more people, I've found, don't have that one Thing where they've got extreme confidence and passion, and, like, this is the horse I'm going to ride all the way in to the finish line. And those who don't actually dabble a little bit and play and experiment, I think are leaving a lot of potential opportunities unexplored as potentially big ones. Now, granted, like, I know I've been guilty of going the other extreme and just going shallow and dabbling as opposed to going really deep.

We have to.

I also think it's necessary because that's where the breakthroughs come. You've got your main thing you're doing, and then you're experimenting and you're guessing and you're testing and you're exploring different things, such as, you know, the business that we bought, it wasn't a business that I needed, or I went into it wanting it, but it was like I saw a potential opportunity here. I was like, okay, let's try this out. Now. I did become very cognizant of the mental bandwidth.

Right. That's probably the majority of it for all of us, honestly.

Well, that's probably been the roughest part for all of us in that business so far, is just balancing the businesses that we're running already and that, you know, mentally and actually the doing of it.

Yep.

So what would almost challenge you, like, what you said, is, you know, people dabbling. Couldn't you do that if you had? Let's just imagine you're a consultant. The most basic thing I feel like you could possibly not saying it's a bad thing, but it's very simple to get started, to get clients. You can start dabbling. Like you said there. Brad is like, okay, I'm gonna try speaking. I'm gonna try YouTube ads. I'm gonna do retargeting on Facebook or all this other crap. You can almost, like, dabble within an offer that you know is making money.

Exactly.

And then experiment. But then parlay what you're learning there into maybe an affiliate offer or some other thing.

The more you can.

Yeah. The more you can keep your. Your experimentation and dabbling.

Focus. Yeah, yeah.

Or at least focus dabbling.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, build a mood around yourself and. And freaking. You'll learn a ton to make money in the process. So.

Absolutely.

Give me an extra mic. You really want to.

What's that?

I think you're giving me your mic.

No, I. I want your mic. You got. If you. If you're not watching this, Joe has got this beautiful pink microphone.

Hashtag pink Mike.

Joe's trying to get this hashtag to catch on, nobody else is on earth.

Is going to use hashtag pink M after his wife. He said he was like, oh, she liked the pink mic.

Do they make men's mics where he bought that?

Men's mics, we'll see. Magic mic. So, but that was a good little tangent. I mean it's, it's, that's what we've been. I think that's like our biggest struggle, I think, but also growth in the last, what like you said, almost a year.

Yeah. And you know, so for me, because my aspirations and I, I just recently almost purchased a much bigger business for like seven figures and we went into due diligence and this is a multi month process and I decided to walk away at the last minute because of a handful of, I don't know, red flags that I saw. And I was just like, you know, I'm going to instead help them make money, but I'm going to just create a profit center and kind of act more as a consultant on this. But I went in deep and, you know, seven figure transaction, you know, required me to learn a whole lot about a whole lot. But at the same time I was honestly scared to death about what if this thing closes and now I have full operational control of this.

Oh yeah.

And I have to admit, this is one of those things that still like, you know, you get out of your comfort zone. This is where I'm out of. My comfort zone is.

If, if and when I acquire my next company, because I know I will, because I am actively looking for this as we all.

Are.

What, you know, will I have what it takes to step in and step up and run that and do it in a way that, you know, it's game on and not kind of floundering because with the business that we bought, it's small enough to where.

It'S too small to get a lot of our time.

At the same time. It's so perfect for all of the things that we know how to do that if we can't make this work the way we want it to and.

10X20X this, we're retiring, going to.

Right Then it makes me feel bad. But so we're, we're in that weird predicament. It's like too small to get a whole lot of time, but it's too much opportunity to neglect. And I've got to admit, for anybody out there watching, listening, you know, thinking that, oh, you know, hey, these guys look like they've got it all together and all figured out like, no, we're.

We do, but we're figuring it out as we go.

And sometimes you just got to jump in. In and hope the net appears.

You know, when it. When it comes to the. The whole acquisitions kind of thing, this is something I've been thinking about lately, and I'm actually curious to hear your opinion, because I don't think we've actually talked about this is. I've kind of more taken the approach that if you figure out one thing that you can really specialize in, like, you can become the expert at this thing. For me, it's media buying. I love paid traffic. I love experimenting with paid traffic. If I can get really good at that, then when we're out looking for acquisitions, I'm specifically looking for businesses where the missing piece is traffic.

Right.

And so that's kind of the approach I think we're sort of heading down when it comes to that acquisitions path is, you know, Joe's a sales guy, I'm a. I'm a traffic guy. Right. Conversion traffic. That's why we're good partners. He focuses on one, I focus on the other. So if we look at businesses and we go, okay, this business is pretty solid. The main thing it's missing is traffic. Well, then that's one we're probably going to explore. Or the main thing this is missing is it's got good traffic, but the conversion element isn't quite there. In fact, we had. It was an acquisition. It was an equity partnership that we did years and years ago where the main thing was conversions. It had shit, tons of traffic going to it. Like, thousands and thousands of mobile apps. Yeah, thousands and thousands of visitors per day coming to this site. It just wasn't converting. They're making 200 bucks a month off of, like, 2,000 visitors a day.

We're like, something's wrong here.

And so we came in, and the very. The only thing we did, the business to start, the first, like, three weeks, the first thing we did was we got a new sales letter written. We went and hired a really good copywriter, explained what we were going for, had an entire new sales letter written, switched out the sales letter. It went from 200amonth to 200 a day overnight when we swapped out the sales letter. And then the next step was, okay, we've got this converting to the traffic that's there now. How do we even take the traffic to a next level? And then we started to put our focus on the traffic. But we went into it knowing, okay, there's. It's got Most of the pieces, we just have one piece to solve. And that piece happens to be one of our specialties.

Yeah.

And so that's kind of the way I think in the future we're going to go into acquisitions. Is that approach, you know, does one of our specialties solve the problem that this business has?

Right. And I think that's super strong. And I know we've talked about this. Joe and I share a lot more in common as far as marketing specialties on. We're kind of more on the creative, the conversion, the connection side. You're the cold hearted black heart traffic monster.

No, I just. I hate people. He's just a.

He's just a big dick.

Whoa. You guys are really our close partners.

We were all giving each other. We were, we were all giving each other nicknames a few days ago on our. One of our meetings. And I named myself Mr. Nice Guy. I thought that was an app, you know, a great nickname for myself.

Of course, everyone on the team was just laughing.

I mean everybody else renamed themselves to Matt is a dick.

We're like, yep, he is a dick.

That would be one name.

And then.

No. Yeah, but you're. You're spot on there. And I think where, you know, in the past, for myself it's caused some mental. I guess, was it frustration is. I've never felt as though I am a supreme expert in one specific ex. You know, specialty, inside marketing. Like, I'm a great copywriter. I'm not the best copywriter.

A great email marketer, but I'm not the best. And there's a lot of these things where it just kind of is those internal feelings of self confidence. And it was always hard for me to kind of pick that specialty. But one of the things that I think I am really good at is that resourcefulness of. In which I think it'll apply really well in future acquisitions is a very resourceful. I know where to find the. The people and the leverage points. I mean, I found you guys to help out. Right.

You like courted us and you bought the business before you even got the agreement. Yes. And then you roped us in there knowing that we would become partners. It was the wildest shit.

Highly.

But it's true. I think you don't give yourself enough credit to. Yes. We're all generalists. We all love to learn.

I think that's an entrepreneur. I feel like, I think we all.

Have that in common. That we're all learning about everything but what we choose to focus on in. From an implementation standpoint, is not everything we learn. Right. So for me, it's been traffic. For Joe, it's been sales and conversion tactics. From our perspective, what we've always seen you as is this amazing networker connector. You figure out how to put this piece with this piece where most people don't see those pieces fitting together.

Yeah. And that's what I think. Yeah. That could. Like that.connecting is been one of my strengths where, you know, somebody once recently called me a kind of a catalyst, which I like a lot because it's like, listen, it's a change agent. You drop Brad in and one little thing he does, maybe a big leverage thing, but.

Like, it doesn't do all the work. It just does some of the primary work that kind of gets it moving. And.

What we were just talking about, kind of especially the way we structured this deal and when I purchased the site, it kind of goes back to one piece of advice that Jay Abraham I've heard, you know, give, which is he said one of his favorite strategies or mindsets is get control of an asset, figure out what to do with it later. And that's what I really was trying to do here. I was like, okay, I'm going to get control of it it, then I'm going to figure it out, get my foot in the door. Because if you are resourceful and you work on that resourcefulness and realizing that if you use access, if you use influence, if you kind of connect those dots, there's not too many problems you can't solve.

Right.

Especially you don't have to know everything if you know the people who do.

I read something. I believe it was in the story brand book by Donald Miller or not, but they were describing this guy's business, and he kind of had the same predicament where he felt like he didn't really fit into any specific specialty. But what he ended up realizing after it was kind of uncovered is that he just knew what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go. And he was able to kind of like what you said. And I feel like we do this in our own specialties, but you do it probably the most often because you're dealing with a lot of businesses, is that you have a vision for the future and you find the people or the tools or the strategies that are going to be necessary to get there. You might not know how to do all that shit, because you shouldn't know that, but you know, the end game, like, where. What's the goal? Like, in three years, we want to sell this business. For five mil or something like that.

Right.

How do we get that?

Another thing too that I've noticed about you is you're always putting offers out there. You're always, you're. You've got a lot of stuff that's out there floating around. Like you might see an opportunity and you'll go to the guy and say, hey, let's do this deal. And you'll throw it out there. You might find another opportunity, hey, let's do this deal. And you've got, you're planting a lot of seeds all the time so that someday you may be able to sow them, you know?

Right. Yeah, I try to play the long game on that and you know, you never know unless you ask. Is a big.

It's huge.

Yeah, that's one of the things I also talk about. You know, speaking of asking, this is a little bit of a diversion, but it just kind of made me think, you know, talking about acquisitions and buying companies and uncovering opportunities, if anybody's out there is a. Runs a marketing agency, if you're a consultant, if you work with clients, I find it mind boggling that people don't ask better questions. Such as, so have you ever thought about selling this business? You know, and. Because that's where these opportunities get uncovered from. And a lot of times they go, oh, well, what do you have in mind? What would you sell for? As we were sitting here, I literally got a.

Message from a guy just saying, hey, do you know anybody who buys, you know, X like these types of businesses? He's asking. Right. And, and I actually do. So we may be, you know, there's.

A broker connection maybe right here.

Exactly.

Yeah, but. And see, that happens all the time with you because every time we meet with Brad, it's always like, yeah, I got this cool shit going on right now. It's opportunity with this big name person or this well connected investment rich guy, whatever. There's always something there for you.

UFC fighters, billionaires, you know, guys like that.

Seriously. There you go, man. But it's, I think it's perfect for where you're at. As long as you kind of own that and know like when we were talking about there's deals you could get, retainer, rev share equity. As long as you're there, just given value, maybe up front, quick wins, but you're helping them, guide them to whatever that big thing they want.

Exactly.

But you show them a little bit of path there, which they probably don't know, then you win. Yeah, everybody wins.

So this has been awesome. Do you guys want to change it up a little bit?

So I don't know if we want to do this now or. I mean, we're actually figuring out the structure of this show as we're recording it. So you're hearing a real life process in this is.

This is stuff we would. We literally sit around and talk about anyway. So we just decided let's. We got to record.

So here's what I think would be cool for this, for our bacon wrapped Hustle episodes, is every month when we do this, we have like three or four questions that we circle back around to that change every month. So, like, one of them that I was thinking is like, what's one book that you're really big on right at the moment? What's one tool or software or something that's just, that's just really, really helping you in your business right now? What's one sort of tip or tactic that's working right now? These are all things that if we ask the same question next month, it's going to change next month. And so I think if, if we. We kind of have a series of questions where every month we're kind of like gauging what's going on and people can hear the progression and what's. What's working for us now. I think that'd be a really cool thing that people would get excited to tune in for.

I think that'd be cool.

I love it.

So what's a, what's a badass tool you're using right now, Matt?

Well, shit, I didn't want to start with me. I came up with the idea.

I'm using mevo. For those of you who are watching me and watching my little hands on my phone, I am not surfing Facebook.

But that's a different question. That's our gadget. So let's start with gadgets.

Oh, well, gadgets. I am playing with mevo, the.

Camera switching live thing. And I don't know if you guys can see this here, but we're gonna go Inception style. You're gonna look at yourself, looking at yourself, looking at yourself. I can really easily make some of these edits that you guys are seeing in the pans. Just using my camera.

It's pretty cool. It's on the fly.

Yeah, on the fly.

It's recording our audio. I mean, we have some professional mics, it's our podcasting mics, but we're also recording for Mevo audio through his iPhone. So that thing saves, transmits to this Mevo has a little card in there. Stores it. You could stream it live. We're not.

I think if you guys want to check it out is get mevo M E V O dot com.

Believe so.

There's no affiliate link on there right now.

We're actually not fans of Mevos.

Well, yeah. Died like the second before.

We tried to set up our Mevo first. It didn't work, and Brad's did.

We'll resuscitate it later.

I'm not gonna say that. Never mind.

So, gadgets. Any other gadgets? I haven't been doing a lot of gadgets.

Well, Matt and I like the Mevo one's good.

So this. Well, we splurged on an iPhone X or 10 or whatever.

Have you guys heard of this iPhone thing?

Well.

Well, the 10. I mean, it's like, it's. I don't know. It's just crazy because there's no damn button on the front. It's just all facial recognition.

That's that thing that came out like 12 months ago, right? Yeah. Shut up.

It's new to me.

Damn it. Hey.

Evo's been out for a couple years.

I actually love my new phone cases because it's a wallet and a phone case in one, so this is all I ever carry on me.

Now, that's actually pretty smart.

That was. Yeah. Hold on. That thing is. That case is amazing. It's called Silk on Amazon. It works for any iPhone case. Yeah, I had this for an old phone. I was like, matt, you need to get this.

I'm gonna have to check that out.

It's like four or five cards you throw in there. It's not your full wallet.

Cash in there?

Not really.

I actually don't much cash. I'll carry like a $20 bill or something like that.

I don't.

I mean, you can see this is all I got on.

I'll show you my latest gadget that I'm really happy with. It's this little pill box right here.

Yeah.

My little AirPods.

Yep.

Oh, you got them. Oh, you didn't tell me that.

Yeah, no, I love these things. Like. Like the setup process for this was insane.

Yeah.

Like you. The second you open it, your phone's sitting here on the desk next to you. You open this like this. You just pop it open. And as soon as you pop it open, the phone says, would you like to connect to your headphones? You hit yes, and they're working. That's how fast it is.

That's my favorite. I lost my first set, and I just recently had to go buy it was so excruciating because they're like $160.

But you spent the money again, didn't you?

Had to spend the money again.

I mean, that's. That's a testament though, if you go back out and you lose them and you're like, oh, they were good enough that I'm going to spend 150 bucks again.

Absolutely.

So that's alien technology, as is facial recognition on iPhones. It's kind of getting me a little worried because that thing opens up, you know, your iPhone opens up just looking at it. And supposedly if you're sleeping in like Brad, you were like hanging, you know, like, put it in front of my face, that it's not going to open up. Like for.

Somehow your eyes have to be open or something.

Somehow you need to be looking at it and the iPhone knows you're looking at the screen or it'll even like turn off.

No, it's so crazy.

The things like kind of like it's quite.

Understand it because I'll. I'll grow my beard long. I'll shave my beard. I'll wear sunglasses. Sometimes I'll wear glasses, Sometimes I'm wearing a hat, sometimes I'm not. Never had an issue with it not recognizing me.

Yeah, yeah.

It's funny. Not even that, but just even like with Facebook Live, for instance. I was recently.

Somewhere and I think I was. I think it was in the Mexico house build that I was on and I was down there with my partner, Frank Shamrock, who.

Little guy no one knows about but the.

But I had the phone and I turned it on him like this. Now Frank is wearing sunglasses and a ball cap. And I was like, I just turned to him like this. And within the first second that I turned to him and says, would you like to tag Frank Shamrock in this? It was a video. He's wearing a hat and sunglasses. Like it knew immediately via video who this was.

Just think about like, just all the data that's getting gathered from all this, all sources. I mean, got Apple, iPhone marketers. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah. So there's some good gadgets. I'm surprised. Yeah, that's cool, man.

No, I like my AirPods. They're awesome. I mean, I started random tangent, but I started walking my dog like every day. I haven't been going on a lot of walks. I started walking my dog every day and I was getting really sick of the cord dangling down. I'm like, I really need to get some wireless. So I just went for the the best. I love them.

Love it. Well, you have this little Fitbit on now too. That's annoying.

Yeah, but I've been wearing. This thing's like five years old.

Yeah, and you're walking. That's cool.

I walk now. I. I stopped walking for a while. Just wheelchaired around.

I had to wheel him around. It's very awkward. We went to meetings and stuff like that.

He come pick me up and push me to the car. Yeah, it was. It was weird, but it was nice.

Nice.

That's awesome.

Yeah, that's good. How about different tools? Like, what are you using on software?

Like on the computer?

All right, so you guys are familiar, but I'm very. I've become a very big fan of Kartra. So Kartra K A R, T, R A. And you can go to baconratbusiness.com Kartra for all your Kartra needs. But it is an all in one marketing automation suite that literally replaces everything thing you need with the exception of, I guess, just a blog. Right. So I saw my WordPress blog, but it is page builder, autoresponder, help, desk.

Checkout, CRM, absolutely everything. And it was created by Mike, Phil, Same, Andy Jenkins, Frank Kern, and a lot of times when a marketer and Hector. Don't forget and Hector.

Yeah, okay.

And when a lot of times when a marketer creates software, it's janky as hell. And it's like, okay, they threw it together for a cash grab. But this is totally different. This one. I'm really happy about it because I don't have to integrate different things with it. I can just get in. It's pretty intuitive and saved me a lot of money just by getting rid of other autoresponders and page builders.

And you kind of get the impression this is their long game.

Yeah, this is a long game.

This is kind of what they're planning on doing for the future. Me personally, with Kartra, I have a little bit of a love hate with it. There's. I mean, overall, for the most part, I do. I do like it. There are a few little things that I wish they'd work out, which we've already shared with Mike and the guys. So, I mean, it's, you know, it's sure it'll happen. There's. There's some things where I early.

Yeah, exactly.

I can't post tracking pixels in certain places where I want the member. Where you actually build the members area needs a little improvement. But other than that, I love, like everything about it. I'm still Big on Thrive cart. When it comes to the actual checkout page, you know there's a lot.

Well, they focus features. Yeah. Like ThriveCart goes deep on just the checkout page, which is amazing. But yeah, Kartra, like you said, like there's some little things, but like the tracking on that thing, I think when we tracking analytics because we used it for launching the first product for our craft brew site, Homebrew site, and we were blown away by like you send the email through Kartra, your sales page is Kartra, your order forms Kartra and your members area. And that whole thing is like you get tracked to the minute detail. Yeah, I mean like which emails freaking fired off a sale.

Some of the automations in there are insane. Like if they watch 25% of the videos video, send this them this email, tag them with this, put this offer in front of them. If they watch 50 of this video, then tag them with this, send them to this video and this like some of that stuff is just like insane. And then they've got the, like when you're logged into the members area, they've already got the card details on file. So you can put like a one click upsell once somebody's logged in just to add to their members area. Some of that shit's really.

Love it.

Yeah, it's. It's really gangster if you look at some of the stuff they're doing. So that's, that's one of the new pieces of software tools that I'm utilizing a lot of. I'm trying to think if there's anything else major that kind of comes to mind. I mean it replaces a lot, so.

No, it does. Yeah.

What about you guys?

What do you use? I mean, I'll let Joe say one because Joe, in our business, Joe and I are pretty much operating in two separate areas. So he's probably got different tools than I would talk about.

Well, I don't know, but I think there's a similar one with Omnifocus is one that I know Matt and I both use, but that's paired up with the strategy of getting things done, which we had David Allen on the podcast just like a week or two ago.

Well, it depends on when this is released.

Yeah, I don't know when this is released, but recently we recorded with him and with Mark's Acosta Rubio. And that Omnifocus tool is one that Matt and I both use every single day. We have it on our phone to capture ideas also. Obviously it's a good Capture device. If you know the getting things done methodology, this is a great tool. Or if you're just looking like. For me personally, I struggle with organization, with just streamlining all these different buckets that I'm living in every day. Matt is way more in tune to that stuff, naturally. But for me, it's kind of wrangling in this chaos side of my brain to where I can function more so in my own personality. It's not changing who I am. But Omnifocus is great. It's not cheap, and I believe it's only on for. It's for Apple devices, right?

Yeah. I mean, I love Omnifocus. Yeah, that's a great tool and I use it a lot too.

I think Wunderlist could be or Evernote could be alternatives.

Yeah, it's like a task list thing. You sort of unload tasks into an inbox and then you go and organize them into separate projects and folders and stuff. And it's really good at organizing your brain. The one sort of beef I have with it is really the cost. It's expensive because, like, you could buy it on your iMac or your MacBook or whatever, buy it on a desktop and it's what, 60 bucks to get the pro version, the premium version that we use. And then you go and go, cool, I'm going to add some stuff to it to my phone. Nope, they want you to pay another 60 bucks to get the phone version. Oh, and if you have an iPad, you got to get an iPad version too. So like, all in, you could be like $240 into this task management product just to be able to use it across multiple devices. But saying that it's been worth it to me. I mean, I've used it so much and it's just been badass.

I think the big thing, though, where people could screw themselves, which I think I would have and probably not followed through with OmniFocus is not having a solid strategy like getting things done. Luckily, we had a. Have a mentor, Marks, a coach to kind of help us with the little minute details of how he would structure stuff. But definitely I would recommend, if you think you need some organization, don't just jump into the tool and think it's going to be easy because it won't be. You need to like, watch their videos. I think they have some training on getting things done. Or just read the book and then apply it and use that thing as your tool, your trusted tool.

What's the on that? So I think I know I've Read Getting things done in the past and I know the basics, probably about 70% of it. And it's the early stage stuff is not bad. But then I've once more. I'm not.

Did you kind of lose it a little better?

Yeah, I kind of start to do it and then I'm like, okay, I like the brain dump. I like the initial organization and whatnot. But then it's. When it gets down to managing in it, it. I don't know, maybe my. It's.

Did you ever have a tool like, did you have something you did all that organization.

I usually use todoist.

Okay.

Which you can make that work with GTD really easy from what I've seen. But some of it's intuitive. I probably just need to get like, go deep on it for a little while. It's funny, I was. I was reading something on it. Some people were talking about gtd and they. One of the complaints was it's. It's kind of complex. It's complex enough to where they were like, I think David Allen wanted to make it. It's David Allen, right?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, here's a book and here's the basics. I'm going to give you just enough to wet your appetite to get you hooked and. But then I'm going to make it complex enough that you have to give me a bunch of money to learn it maybe. Right.

So.

I am not the most efficient at time management, unfortunately. So it is an area that I'm trying to get better at.

See, that's you and I. And that's where that's like my focus right now is to wrangle that stuff in. And. And partially it's because we interviewed with him. I've read the book before, but never just like you didn't stick because I wasn't applying it. I wasn't making moves with every day. The capture part of it, it was like. I think it's the most freeing thing that you could possibly do because you just take all those open loops out of your. In your head and you put them on paper or in that device.

That's my favorite part is that write it down. And then I look at it. I'm like, can it just. Just magically disappear?

Well, that's the thing. I mean, we go into conversation like you don't have to do every single thing on the page.

Yeah, that's. That's one thing that David Allen was really talking about a lot when we had him on the show was that most people think if you list it down in your inbox. You know your capture phase, you've got to do this. But really when you go through and you do your review phase where you're kind of looking at everything you've listed out, you could delete frickin half of it if you want. You could delegate a bunch of it to other people. Just get the ideas out of your head. The whole idea is like a mental sort of freeing thing where the you go through this capture phase because you got a lot of shit spinning in your head before you go to bed first thing in the morning. Just capture everything as it comes to you in your head and just get it out of your brain. And then later on when you're in a review phase, you can go now that's crap. No, that's crap. No, that's crap. Delete a bunch of shit. Delegate a bunch of shit.

Or Someday maybe folder is like huge.

Create a folder called Someday maybe and you throw it in a folder, say I'll circle back to that one in like a year.

And then you review that weekly. So you're like, oh, that's a great idea. Now I can bring it out of that and then apply it to a different folder.

The biggest game changer about that is the capture phase. Get everything out of your head and either onto paper or in some sort of system.

Absolutely. And that's the easiest part for me.

And that's, that's the part that is the main thing.

70% there.

Yeah, that's, that's like. Seriously, that's the, that's the thing is the decluttering of the brain. Yeah. But I have, I have two more tools.

Go for it.

Both of them I've actually written blog posts on. So Joe actually probably knows what I.

Know what you're talking about.

So the first one is a tool by a guy named Paul Clifford. We've had him on the podcast twice now called Designer. And what Designer does is you can actually type in the URL of a blog post and it'll convert that entire blog post into a PDF version and then you can use that as an opt in for that blog post. Surprisingly works really, really, really well. Amazing just to give somebody a PDF version of a blog post. I think there's something psychological where they think if I have this PDF I will read it later. You know, it's a great opt in.

It works.

Yeah. But they actually just released this new feature they call it, I think Designer AI. And what it is is you can actually link onto a YouTube video, plug in a podcast episode and it actually transcribes the whole thing for you. And then as you're listening back to the transcription, to sort of double check it, you click one button. It'll actually take screenshots of that, videos.

Inside your transcripts, places, links in there to websites.

You mention this because I use Designer just came out.

The AI feature is brand new and it's on their premium, like, so it's like the. Whatever. I don't know what level you're at.

But it's not like the cheap, cheap version. It's like, it's not that much more.

But to pull out your computers and you have to show me how it.

Does that for sure.

But yeah, basically it. It transcribes everything. It's like a. An automated transcription. So we'll miss some things here and there, but you go back through, you listen to it, you correct it yourself, and then there's one button. You press the button and then let's say you brought in a YouTube video. It will actually take screenshots of that video and throw them right into your transcripts with timestamps of where that was.

That's ridiculous.

So that reminds me of two other tools that I use. One of them is Trint T R I N T and the other is Otter AI. So, Trent and Super. Are you. Are you familiar with both?

Yeah.

Cool. Yeah, yeah. So super. Yeah, so super similar. Otter AI is the one I've been using, which is, you know, you upload a. An audio file or a video file or whatever, and it automatically transcribes things and then you hit play and you can hear the words going, so you can see where it is. And then if you click on a word, obviously you can edit it if you want to change it, and it'll show you kind of where it is in the audio. But it doesn't. It's not doing screenshots and stuff.

That's.

So that's kind of.

Well, that's the thing with designers. You do this whole. It does its transcription thing in minutes and it's all AI stuff. But they're using. He was explaining, like Amazon's AI Google. Like, you could tap into their APIs and their technology, and that's how it's transcribing a lot of that. And it's constantly learning.

Yeah, the tool gets smarter. So as you go through and you transcribe stuff, when you fix little errors, the tool's getting smarter based on that information.

Dude. Even random names. Like, we tested this with one of James Schramko's podcasts. And I think I purposely used. I think it was Scott from Wicked Reports. His last name is just.

Degrcier, but I would never be able to spell that thing. And it nailed it. I was like, how the hell it does that? But really? Yeah. I mean, still, it's not perfect. And Paul will be the first to admit that.

Just imagine, like, you're making a tutorial video or something. It doesn't have to be on YouTube, but let's say you make a tutorial video that shows you how to set up your first Facebook ads or something. And you make this video and you're like, okay, so you're gonna click on this button in the top left corner, and then you're gonna scroll and you're gonna click this button, and that says create ad here. And then you're gonna. And you're explaining the whole process well before, if you got the transcriptions, they're not that helpful because if you look at the transcription, it says, click here and then go to this link over here. Right. That's what you're showing on the screen, but it's irrelevant in the transcription. Now, if you throw in little screenshots in there, you now have an ebook that you can sell with that tutorial. So let's say this is. This is a product right here, right? Let's say I want to make a Facebook ads course. I can go and sell the ebook version of my Facebook ads course for. For 20 bucks or whatever. And then if you want to upgrade to the video version and make it the little bump offer for 20 more bucks, we'll send. We'll send you the actual video.

I'm actually looking forward to the moment we quit this recording. So you can. We can play with that and you can show me. That's super cool.

Yeah.

And it. Doesn't it pick out, like, different speakers, too?

It can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it'll name them based off of what tag, and then it'll say, like, okay, well, that was Joe all the way through here. That was Brad here, man.

Yeah. So, I mean, as podcasters, it's come. Come in super, super handy because our last, like, 10 episodes that we've transcribed, we've just thrown them into Designer.

Well, you can see an example of this in the show notes. At least we'll put it on Evergreen profits.

I'm sure you'll.

You'll take it too. But, yeah, you'll see them in action there.

Yeah. So one more tool. Yeah, another one. And this one. Actually, the blog post just went Live last. Well, the recording, it went live last Friday. A tool called Convert Box. Now I'm sure you're familiar with like Thrive Themes and Optin Monster and there's a bunch of Optin and sort of tools out there. Well, we started testing this new one called Convert Box and our conversions just doubled. And there's a couple email conversions, right? Email opt ins. Yeah, sorry. This is an opt in tool. So you know, exit intent pop ups and the little slide ins that slide in or the, you know the welcome mat that pops up that like scrolls down from the top of the screen. All of that kind of stuff. You know, Thrive, Thrive leads and often Monster, a lot of that kind of stuff. But this one, there's not a lot of variation in the actual design of the opt in form. You kind of get what they give you, but the opt in form that they give you converts like crazy. It doubled our opt in rate and we didn't do anything. We didn't change the traffic source, we didn't change the image on the little opt in form, we didn't change the copy.

Copy's identical.

Change anything, everything was identical. We just switched from one tool to the other. Use their default design that they give you. And our opt in rates just went, wow, amazing. And so there's a few really, really cool features in there. They've got like conditional targeting. So if, if they've seen this blog post but not this blog post, put this opt in form in front of them. If they came in from a Google search, put this opt in from them. If they came in from a Facebook ad, put this opt in in front of them. Dynamic. So all sorts of like switching dynamic sort of opt in boxes based on previous things that they've done. If they read this blog post and they're in Germany, show them this opt in form. If they're read this blog post and they're in the U.S. show them this opt in. So all sorts of like conditional opt in forms that you can do. And this is the thing that I really, really liked was there's an option to make it based on tags. So if you're using WordPress, all I have to do is say I created a tag that was like one of our opt in is the marketing stack cheat sheet. So all the tools we use in our business, if I give it the tag Marketing stack cheat sheet. Now any blog post that has that tag on it, this opt in form will pop up.

So it's all you tag the blog post with. Marketing tag sheet. Oh cool.

Yeah. So Basically, now all I have to do is every time we make a new blog post, we've got like five or six lead magnets that we use. We're starting to use unique lead magnets as well, but we've got five or six, like default lead magnets that we'll use based on what the content of that post is. So if we talk to like a financial guy, like a Phil Town or some of the cryptocurrency guys we've had on the podcast, we've got one opt in that's really relevant to those types of conversations. It was a mindset guy. We've got a different opt in. So now all we have to do to, to make that opt in work is we publish the blog post or the podcast to go live and then I just give it a tag with whatever lead magnet I want it to pop up and it's just on there.

What are you guys mainly doing for your more unique lead magnets, especially as they apply to individual episodes?

We make a cheat sheet, like a CliffsNotes version of the episode.

So we have a whole process. Patty on our team does that. She manages all of our content, writes our show notes, does transcriptions and things like that. What she does. And this is great, this is easily something you can have anyone on your team do or hire it out. She lists to every episode, takes extensive notes, like I think handwrites all this stuff. So she's just like jamming it in her brain where she like knows this stuff probably better than getting pretty smart. Yeah, I'd say so. Good. Free education, huh? Well, actually we're paying her, Patty, but yeah. So she takes those, then creates a cheat sheet which is like a couple of pages or longer. And those are like Cliff Notes version of every podcast. And usually we'll highlight a process or something that like step by step, someone can just download and then implement.

Yeah.

Do you know approximately what the per episode like conversion rate is on that? At least on your blog post?

On the unique ones?

On the uniques.

Well, yeah, in general land on your page and look at it like, what?

On the unique ones? I actually haven't looked at the numbers fairly recently, but I would say a good. Our old numbers, before we were using this convert box, we were getting like a 3% opt in rate.

Yeah.

Now we're getting a 7.

That's good.

So, and that's without. That's literally without any customizations of anything so important.

3% to 7%. The unique opt ins where it's like, okay, we talked to Brad Costanzo, he talked his seven step process to buy a business.

Zero percent opt in.

Here's the. Here's the cheat sheet to get those seven steps right. Those we will. We might see like a 10% of the people that go to that page. It's a little boost over what you'd see on our default opt ins.

Cool.

I like that. Good tools. Good tools.

Tools are great.

Tools are great. But.

And we'll list all of these in the show notes. I don't know if Brad will for his people, but we will for our people.

He's just gonna copy and paste from our page and we're gonna go to Google and be like, slap him. Stealing our content.

Just call me out. This will be a fun one because we'll both. We need to publish this on the same day. Shut up.

All right. Challenge.

So you'll be. This will be like in stereo. This will be two different places on itunes.

It will be stereo. Yeah. Play each podcast in different ears with different devices. Hit play at the same time.

And ideally, if you're listening to this on the Hustle and Flow chart, you'll go and subscribe to Brad@ Baconrap. And if you're listening to this on Bacon Wrap Business, you'll come over to the Hustle and Flow chart and subscribe to us.

Yeah, but.

All right, so what we got, we got.

Well, I know you, Brad. You've been hanging out at this. This beach house recently. You've been to one. Yeah, Beach House one.

That's what. That's. That's its name.

Beach House one implies there's going to be more.

Yeah, exactly. Or are there more?

Right?

Well, they're. We're working on it. We're working on it.

Can. Can beach house to be Maui, right?

Oh, hey, well, let's wait until the fires and the hurricane go away.

We're just going to take over all the Mission Beach.

Okay, that's fine. That's.

Rumor has it I'm going out there on Wednesday.

Rumor.

To take a look at a place right behind it that is for rent.

Oh, damn.

And we'll see how that works.

Okay.

Called me and told me.

So he knows.

Yeah.

One of these episodes of Hustle Wrapped Flowchart, you might.

You're just gonna change every time.

Every damn time. That's fine.

You may see us out at the bh because one of my most recent podcasts you can see. I'll put a link to that. Potentially.

Maybe we should get our like GoPros of us on scooters. But like A thing that's like out here looking at us as we're going down the boardwalk.

I like that idea.

I don't know how we're going to hear each other. Maybe we'll have like headsets, like Backstreet Boys or something, you know, But I like that you see where this is going? Yeah. Out of sync. That'll be our name.

So since we're at 52 minutes now.

Are we. Damn.

Let's talk about. Let's wrap this kind of, I guess wrap it up. Up bacon. Wrap it up.

Fine.

Because I want to talk about books. But what else did you want to talk about?

Books. And also like kind of a killer tip tactic that's working in your business.

We have those.

Oh, we could probably come up with some on the fly.

Yes.

I'll make something up.

Let's do that.

All right, go for it.

Who wants to go first?

So let's start with books and then we'll end with the tactics because I think most people came for the tactics and we're putting it to the end. And then Joe has to take his shirt off. So we've got that.

Damn it.

That's right.

Hey, you start with a book. Let's do a book first. I actually need to pull my iPhone out and look up the name of a book.

I want to do that too, except that I'm using my iPhone for camera system.

Okay, I'll start with me. I don't know how you're going to find your books. No, you just listed them out to us at lunch.

I just had to remember the name of my book.

All right, so the one I'm reading right now, one of a couple is storybrand by Donald Miller. It's a great book. It is. And I'm about to 3/4 of the way there. But the thing is absolutely amazing if you're trying to figure out how to actually tap into your customers minds in a totally different way that most people don't. Unless you're like an experienced copywriter that knows all this shit. This will give you frameworks and literally it's like a free thing online you can map out and swipe and use for. Like if you're writing emails, sales copy, your videos, any kind of presentation to people you want to influence. This book will show you the frameworks. And I think the biggest aha was oh, there's like you're talking to not only their external problems, like if someone's trying to make money with whatever. Oh yeah, you want to make more money. Great. That surface level that's not really what they're feeling like inside. It's the internal struggles, the external. It's the world struggles and, like, their daily lives and how the world should be those struggles. If he could speak to all those and then give a clear, you know, call to action that follows up where they can trust you. You can empathize. Empathize. Emphasize, emphasize. Empathize. Damn it. Too much coffee.

You can empathize with these folks, but also show your authority. It's like you combine those two things. In his little tiplance, he gives you. You're freaking on fire with anything you're selling. And constantly I'm reading this book, and then I have my omnifocus out, and I'm like, holy shit, that's something I can implement. That's a little tweak on the sales page. Just little things. Like, I read this last night is like, okay, give them three steps. Anytime you're trying to, like, tell someone to do something, tell them, like, okay, what happens before? Let's say they want to buy a product. Say, okay, well, figure out, like, where you're at, what you're looking for. You give them, like, an idea of, like, kind of give them, like, a list of things that they can invest and say, okay, this is what I want to learn. Then you say, okay, well, join the course. And then after the fact. Now we're going to walk you through these couple steps here that are like the common next steps after purchase. And it kind of helps answer objections that people normally would ask or maybe never ask and just go away and not buy. So you're almost like, answering this and you're just growing trust prior to ever even asking them to do something. And it's just like, like three sentences. That's one way to just push them over the edge without any real selling. So story brand's amazing for everybody.

Yeah, Super.

So you've been on fire.

I have.

Does that make you an entrepreneur on fire?

I will be. Why?

I'm just wondering if you're ready to ignite.

Oh, damn. JLD is like, our favorite listener. He loves us.

Don't be throwing shade.

I'm not throwing shade. I'm just saying.

Where did that come from?

I just heard you say you're. You've been on fire, and it made me think of entrepreneur.

I didn't know I said that.

Is it I don't say, Are you ready to sizzle?

Are you ready to sizzle?

Please start.

I need to start.

You should.

Do you want me to go or.

Do you want to go, you go. Hopefully Brad can figure out you literally.

Just looked straight ahead and said, you go.

Well, I was thinking I looked at your phone. Oh, because you had books out. Come on. There's a reason.

Okay, so right now I'm actually reading Clockwork by Mike Michalowitz, but I'm not. That's not the book that I'm going to mention.

You just did.

I did, but we're gonna have him on the show and we'll dive deep into that book. I'm only like a couple chapters in, so I don't want to give a full review yet. The book that I was gonna mention is gonna be a really nerdy sort of data driven book called Making Websites Win.

It's probably a good book.

It definitely is a good book. It's an amazing book. It's called Making. I'm looking at my iPhone. Making websites apply the customer centric methodology that has doubled the sales of many leading websites by Carl Blanks and Ben Jessen. And this was actually recommended by Andre Chaperone. And I grabbed it and went, this book is freaking amazing. But the whole book is all about conversion optimization, split testing, and why did you.

No, it's perfect. I'm just saying, like, this is because, like, we delineated things in our business. Matt and I, like, we were talking about earlier, and this is exactly where his head should be. And this is where we've shifted over the last, like, handful of months is like, you know, this is your shit right here. So. No, I'm just. I love it.

And I think, I mean, I think.

Although I thought Matt was more of a traffic guy.

I am. I'm a traffic. I like to do split tests. I do split tests a lot. I am the split tester as well.

I'll get. I'll pipe him ideas, I'll give him some copy. We'll work on it together.

Yeah. So this book is. It's all about split testing and conversion optimization. But this book argues, and I mean, I think most marketers that have been around for a while will agree with this, is that you shouldn't be split testing minor changes. Most people go, oh, I'm a split test of orange versus blue, but button right. We might see like a teeny lift in conversions from one color to another. But the, A big. The big idea of this book is just like, test wildly different ideas. Test, you know, test talking to this market versus this market. Test when you're driving traffic through, like, ads. Test this targeting versus this targeting. And so many people Want to go to this, like, granular place of. Okay, I'm going to test this sub headline against this sub headline, or I'm going to test a blue button versus an orange button or all of this stuff. And I feel like those are very, very marginal improvements. And let's say you're getting like a million visitors a month. That stuff's probably very, very valid for the rest of us who aren't getting a million visitors a month to our website. You want to track, test very, very dramatically different pages and offers. And this book is just loads and loads and loads of ideas of things to test.

I think I actually have that in my Kindle. I think it was because of Andre. Either your recommendation or Andre's.

Yeah, I Andre email this list about.

It, and I think that's why.

And I went and read the description. I'm like, this is a book I need.

Perfect. What's that called again?

Making Websites Win.

Cool.

So a few of the books off the top of my head that I'm reading right now. Few, because that's the easiest. I'm reading Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos. Highly recommended. Really, really good stuff. I am reading a book called Goalless Living. I think it's goalless living or Living Goalless or something like that. And it's a. It's just a really interesting. I'm only about like 30 or 40% through it, but it's just a really interesting.

Argument about why fuzzy goals are better than smart goals, which is the smart meaning specific, measurable, actionable, timely, whatever you missed in R, whatever it is.

Something.

Yeah. Realistic, maybe very specific. And I've always kind of. Of operated by very fuzzy goals in my own life. And this has some really interesting concepts about how, you know, instead of using a map, use a compass and instead of just goals, use aspirations and a little bit of language changing. But it's interesting. It's a, you know, it's not a marketing book, but it's just general mindset.

But it's something I think we all relate to. Absolutely. Like, we were talking about this at lunch. Is this whole thing of it, like, it's really tough sometimes and I don't know, maybe it's easier for some people but to figure out, all right, where the hell are we going? Like, what is that big thing we're after? And I doubt it's always going to be the same thing for the rest of our lives. But.

This thing. I like the whole analogy of use a compass and the compass and Then you talk about. It's how a ship goes to its destination. It's not usually a straight line. It's doing the zigzag kind of thing. And that's where a compass really comes in. Is like, if you have a fuzzy idea of, I want to go that direction.

Plus, if you get. Yeah, if you get off track, if you're on a map and you've got one path, and then you get off track and that note, that map is no longer applicable for where you're going and. But a compass will still get you there. It's like, okay, that's still where I need to be. I can do it a different way. It's a little bit more adaptable. I mean, if you have a map and a compass, it's probably a little bit better. And I think that's key. The third book that I'm reading is called the Third Door, and it's by Alex Banion. And it is. It's just a really interesting book where this guy interviewed and studied all these. Some of the world's top leaders, from Bill Gates to Warren Buffett, actually interviewed them. And his whole thing was to find out what was one of the keys that unlocked their. Like, unlocked their career. And what was that? You know, what was that kind of those pivotal moments. And what he realized is that, you know, there's the. There's the first door, which is just, you know, the traditional method. Work hard and get in. There's the back door, which is, I knew somebody. And a lot of times there's that third door where it takes some ingenuity, some creativity, some brute force and some luck, and all of those combined. And it's like, oh, that's the way in. And sometimes it's. Sometimes it. You know, I can read like an adventure story the way it happened, and you don't really realize that. I mean, not everybody's had it handed to him, and not everybody just, you know, worked and took the traditional route. A lot of times it's a way. You're like, oh, my God, I didn't even know that. So I literally, like my kindle, says I'm 19% of the way through. He set up the premise, and now he's off to his adventures. So that's a super good book. As I said, I've got a lot more in there, but those are the ones I'm reading right now.

And you said Steven Spielberg's one of those.

Yeah, one of those examples was Steven Spielberg and how he got his. His career going. And a Lot of times, by the way, it's some sneaky, underhanded, not in an unethical way, but like, sneak your. Sneak your way in if you actually read. So one of my clients, Jesse Itzler, wrote a book called the Living with the Seal. And in it he talks about how he got his first record album. And the way he got his record album is a rap. A white Jewish rap star back in the early 90s was that he was working at a. He was working at a record studio and basically, like, cleaning floors and doing not much else and trying to get a demo in here and there when he could. And there was a rapper named Dana Dane who I wasn't really familiar with, but I think he was. He had a couple big hits back at the time. And he had left a. He had left a. A demo tape there. And he. He grabbed. And Jesse grabbed it. And he knew that this guy, I think his name was Mike, who's a record producer, that his favorite artist was. Was Dana Dane. And he.

I.

If I remember the story right, he called up. Called him up, and he's like, yeah, this is, you know, Jesse with Dana Dane, and we want to get this demo to you. And she thought he. She was. He was saying he is Dana Dane. So she's like, yeah, okay. Yeah, Mr. Ross can see you now. And he goes in and he's basically acting like he's Dana Dane and he's not. But he finally gets his foot in the door. He's like, no, that's not me. He's on his way, but he wanted me to. But while. While we're waiting, let me show you my demo. And then he got a record deal. So it's just kind of finagling your way in there sometimes, but gotta be.

A little schemy, you know? Yeah. It's thinking out of the box.

Okay.

Explain that story in Living with a Seal.

Yeah. Oh, cool.

Yeah, exactly.

I like it. He.

I've also got some videos of him explaining it where, like, on video, it's just super cool. But Living with a Seal is a great book.

That's a good book. Yeah, I read that a few years ago.

Yep.

So if.

What else we got?

I have some. I can take this all over the place. I have, like, some random questions we can talk about just for fun, but for it. All right. So out of curiosity, if.

We'Ve actually were talking about this earlier, but I think it's a fun conversation, like, what would your sort of ideal business life look like?

Either one.

I think we all Have a similar answer. Get paid, do not be well. Well, I think we're all in a pretty good agreeance. At least we've chatted about it is podcasting is doing stuff like this. But yeah, because podcasting, I feel like for all of us, it's a perfect opportunity to just chat like this, talking.

To cool people about business and stuff and getting paid.

Well, it's exactly. What you just said is like you almost like hack your way into different circles too. So if you like, for us, I know with our podcast, a lot of the times it's selfish and our guests know that. It's not like we hide it, but we can instantly grow our network and that reach all that stuff you were talking about that enables you to get in, maybe learn a strategy, but also just get in with a circle of people that you would have never had the chance to. Like David Allen, for instance, like the author of Getting Things Done. We're like, holy shit. And that would have never happened without a podcast. I mean, I think that personally, I think that would be a really great business, is to, yeah, have some. Have a great business going that we love that we're working in our fields very well. But podcasting is something where it's like, look at Joe Rogan.

I agree. I'm with you there. For me, it would be if. If there was only one thing I could focus on. Let's say there was some like, rich investor that's just like, I love you. I'm gonna pay you a bunch of money. You just go do whatever you want.

Do we have one of those listening?

Right?

If you're listening.

If you just want to give us money because you like us, this is what I would.

You want us to open doors for.

You, we'll mention for real.

That's good. I would legitimately, I would pretty much just go all in on podcasting. My dream podcast would not necessarily be about business and marketing all the time. I would talk about it from time to time, but I would love to have like that Joe Rogan style podcast where it is just, I talk to interesting people all the time. Sometimes it's about business, sometimes it's about.

Matt Wolf talking about whatever the hell he wants.

Whatever I want. Sometimes it's about travel, you know, on Joe Rogan, it's a lot about ufc, which, you know, I'm not as into, so probably get rid of that element. But he talks about, you know, like, substances and stuff like that. I find it all fascinating. And so I would just have like, really interesting conversations with People that I find interesting. Some of them would be about business, but it would just be wherever I want to go and we just talk about it. And then I also figure out some way to. To get traveling into the mix. So if you're listening to this and you know how I can build that life for myself.

If you are a sugar daddy.

Yeah. Come be my sugar daddy.

Mine is. Mine's real similar. You know, the only thing that makes me think that that wouldn't be perfect is the, you know, if. If money's no object and got to do this, like, I don't like the idea of being tied to it all the time. Like, oh, my man, I got to get it out. So, like, you know, Tonight show host or something like that would be phenomenal. Be Jimmy Fallon or. Or whatnot, but you're also tied to it. Taking a month or two off is harder to do. Now with podcasting, it's easier because you can backload a lot of episodes.

And we're also working with the travel podcasting kit right now.

Absolutely. Do this for me.

So it's not. Yeah. So, okay. You just basically.

And you know, we have a great process where you can hire it out. Editing, uploading, show notes.

That is true.

I mean, ideally. So my ideal scenario would be I would have a studio, probably not unsimilar to the one we're in right now, where there'd be, like, a big table, the mics would be kind of permanently mounted there, and I would have a studio guy who. Your job is to hang out in the corner and make sure the audio is coming out good, make sure we're talking.

We're talking, and that's it. Yeah, I agree with you. The. Because this is the kind of stuff I like to do the most, is create, connect, and then explore different opportunities. My ideal business is the one where maybe I've got interests and I'm advising on multiple businesses and. And that creates a pretty steady stream of, I guess you'd call active, semi passive residual, but income. And that allows me to swing for the fences and chase new blue oceans and uncharted territory and opportunities and new projects.

I've really come to the realization that I need to be creating in order to be kind of happy. And if I'm not, and when I'm just working behind the scenes and just. Just doing stuff, I'm just not happy. I can be effective, but I'm not, like, happy. I do like creating, whether it's writing or doing videos or doing audios, and I need to do More of it. It's one of the things that I've been telling myself that is it's a commitment.

I agree. I'm kind of in that same boat. For me, I'm the happiest when I'm honestly, when I'm trying to solve problems. Like when I'm trying to figure out, like, okay, why isn't this converting or how do I get more traffic on it that, that I have, that, you know, we haven't tapped yet. I like really, really being experimental all the time. And if I'm experimenting and testing new ideas and testing new things, that's where I'm happiest. But I also love really, really interesting discussion. That's just my favorite thing out of our entire business. Everything we do in our business, the podcast, hands down, that's the one thing that I would never let anybody take away from me.

You can't take this.

Well, there's been times I've thought about quitting and I've thought about, like, I don't know if I want to do, do this anymore just because I've gone through, you know, you go through the ups and the downs and the lulls.

It's a marathon, man. I mean, that's.

Yeah. But in general, I wouldn't quit.

No. And that's the thing with podcasting. I know we. You had the longer show, the Multiple Authority podcast, but we started back in 2010 and definitely didn't have the long term game like we thought it would be a business. The podcast.

Well, our first podcast, the Online Income podcast, I think we released three episodes probably, and then gave up on it. And then I think maybe a year later I had another. I had two podcasts at the time. I had the Business and Blogs podcast and I had the Online Income podcast, which was co hosted with Joe. The Business and Blogs podcast, I think made it to about episode 15. The online income podcast made it to about episode three. Then Joe and I reunited to do Evergreen Wisdom podcast. Did like wis. That was. I think we got to like maybe episode 17 with that one. And then I did beyond the Hype with Josh. I think we did about 12 episodes with that.

See a trend.

Yeah. But then the Multiply Authority podcast, I made it to like episode 70 or something. And then Joe, I talked to Joe, I said, hey, do you want to co host a podcast with me? And so that podcast essentially just got rebranded as Hustle and Flowchart, but kept going.

But we had the. A different intention going into it. I think that we were like, all right, this cannot be the business.

So if you look at our podcast.

Podcast isn't.

Yeah.

I mean, in, in most cases the podcast is not a business.

Right.

Yeah, there's a few people who can.

Really?

Which is why I said someone needs to pay me to be able to do it.

Exactly.

Like even sponsorship money, like you thought about doing Patreon?

Yeah. Oh, we haven't thought about it.

I've thought about it. We haven't played with it. I've talked to some people who, some of the guys we met with the other day who do the optimal living daily podcast. They use Patreon and they were telling us it does okay, but it's nothing.

Buys them a six month sponsor every weekend.

Yeah. And they do have sponsors, but I mean, I feel like to make really, really good money off sponsorships, you've got to be up there. Like you're like the top 5% of podcasts.

The old guys, actually. And Justin's probably listening to this because he listened to all of our podcasts, so. Hey, Justin. They're amazing because they have built a business out of their podcast, but they do it in a very strategic way. They're leveraging a lot of different platforms and people. So check them out. It's amazing. But it's interesting. Yeah. Because we met with them last week up in Irvine because, you know, they know how to get the eyeballs. I think they have millions of people every single month listening to their podcast, which is outrageous to me, but amazing. But then they don't really know the conversion element. Like they don't know the marketing and how to really scale the money side of the thing. Whereas that's why they came to us. We came to them for the visibility them or us to them, to us for sales stuff.

Both have areas that could help each other out.

Yeah.

Very symbiotic.

But yeah, it's still, it's, it's the coolest part of a business, so.

So, yeah, it really is. And it's one of the things I've, you know, more so doubling down on as opposed to just treating it, you know, I, I give my podcast love, but not as much as I should because, you know, you get busy running business and making money and doing everything else, and then it's funny when I look back at all of the amazing things and opportunities and things that I'm doing in my business, in my life, like 80 or 90% of them are a direct result of the podcast.

I can't agree more. I mean, the network that we have, the connections we have I mean a lot of them were built before the podcast, but the podcast was just exponential growth.

Well, those connections connected us to people at a different level or in different circles higher up. I mean, it doesn't matter how influential they are, but it's different circle and it's just a big web we're building.

And what's interesting too now is when we go to events. We go to Traffic and conversion every year and we go to a handful of events throughout the year. It used to be, I used to be like, oh, you're Matt, the, the WordPress classroom guy, right? That was my first business I ever had. Or I, I, I merged and became Learn to blog with Bradley Will. So like people knew me as the blogging guy or the WordPress guy for the longest time. And Joe was the video guy. Joe was, had a video agency, so everybody knew him as the video guy. Now we go to events and everybody's like, oh, you're the Hustle and Flowchart guys. Like, it's become our identity now. The podcast has essentially become our business identity. People know Hustle and Flowchart brand more than they know they Evergreen Profits brand.

Absolutely.

That's fine. They are connected.

But yeah, no, same here. And I have at times wanted to change my brand from bacon Rant business because it's fun, it's a little cheeky and cheesy and funny, but it's also memorable as hell and everything.

Well, your clothes constantly just like I.

Do look like I'm wearing a shirt.

We just waft out bacon smell at all times. I don't know, it's like he like rubs oil.

You should get some like bacon cologne. And then when you walk around it at events. Does somebody smell bake? Oh, it's Brad. So everybody knows when you walk in the room, even if you're like not even near them.

Right?

That's true. Well, that usually happens too. But not from bacon smell.

Yeah, it's just because you don't shower.

Very crop dusting or that.

Oh, okay.

All right.

On that note, let's, let's.

I think this might be a good last like wrap up question, but let's, let's each kind of share a tip or tactic or something that's working really well in our business right now. And let's start with Brad, you son of a bitch. Quick.

It's working really well.

And it doesn't have to be something you created either because I'm going to share something that I learned from somebody else, so.

Right. So I've been working on a content framework that is starting to work really well and I'm utilizing it with clients and it is, you know, because content is king and building a brand out there that tells a story, that does a story brand and, and builds an audience and creates people who know like and trust you is hard and, or it can be challenging if you don't have a framework and you can, and I used to tell clients just to just create content, just micro snackable content. And the hard part about that is that they were, you know, kind of fumbling around, not exactly knowing what to do. So I've been creating or I've created this framework whereby it starts with a brainstorm and then they slowly filter it out to okay, what kind of, what, what is the general theme of the kind of content you want to create? Which of your like the pillars of your message does it really support? Like, you know, usually there's like four or five pillars and then is it, you know, there may be 20 different types of things that you know, you can create and then of those, is there a point you're trying to make? Is there a metaphor or a story that can back up that point? Is there a moral to that story? Is there a kind of a call to action? And you know, a call to action, especially if you're trying to do content branding type videos doesn't have to be, hey, opt in to get my ebook. It can be.

So next time you're going through this, I want you to stop and think and do this or write this down. So it can be an action you can get the person to take without you. And by doing that you're kind of, you know, you might be giving them a result in advance that they can apply and then, you know, have good rapport with you.

And it's just starting to make it a lot easier for the clients that I'm working with going, okay, now I can see how I can start to distribute content, different types of content that support my message.

So I love it, man.

Something that's working, that's cool.

I dig that. I would say a lot of the focus that, that I've been doing and this is something that Matt and I, and probably in the last couple months we've really just been like, like I said mentioned earlier, we siloed ourselves into these positions where we feel like we're the best at in our business. So what I've done a lot of is the sales, it's communications with prospects, also with buyers, so previous customers cross sale opportunities. But the big thing Is like personalization of the sales process or even the follow up. Like, I'll do live chats all the time. So a constant thing that I have in my daily tasks are follow ups. So that's gonna involve email. The forums that we have in our buyers area, our members area, voxer access, we have a private access area for higher paying clients. We have many chat, so it's the live chat, messenger chat, we have our Facebook groups, all those things. I pretty much like have these, this list that every day I go through. And the mini chat might be multiple times a day, but in those chats I'm not only talking with them, I have some macros and stuff. So I'm not making things up every single time. So time efficiency thing. But Loom videos, I think I learned of Loom from you originally.

Loom's great.

And I use those when I see an opportunity where I know this person's gonna watch it for one. If they're halfway engaged. I'm probably not gonna do this. But like, I'll shoot a three minute video and they'll say like, hey, how does this work on the back end? The of up Thrive cart, for instance. And I'll show them how to integrate. Like I'll just shoot a Loom video, fire up the camera, I'll have my face on there. And you know, complete this video, personalize for them with their name in there, call to action at the end, give them good reason to follow up and actually ask me a question. Because I always try to create an open loop in every single message so it forces them to respond. It's usually just a simple question. And then from there, in the Loom video, in the title, I always put their name and the date. And you know, if I know it's gonna be multiple videos, there's probably a number after the date, but I know exactly when they view the video. It's in the email. Like it'll kick me an email or notification. So if they don't respond, I'm not gonna be like, hey, I saw the video Bob, or you saw the video Bob won't be sneaky like that, but I'll at least go after him a little harder or ask him specific questions about that video. And these people, like, I've screenshotted things to you and they're like, holy, you just gave me like 90% more education. And before you buy in the course, then they're like, I'm in. Like, I don't even know you, but I trust you so much more. Where do I buy.

Dude, this, this concept of the, the mini chat plus loom is effing insane. Like, it's so killer because like you said, basically you're, you're going and people are asking a question about ThriveCart or our traffic course or, you know, something that we're selling. And Joe be like, like, let me explain it to you real quick. He'll go and hit record on Loom real quick. He'll go in the back end of thrivecart and he'll be like, hey, Bob, thanks for your question. Here's the answer.

In the Facebook.

Yeah, you grab the loom link and you drop it straight into mini chat and say, hey, here's, here's the video I, I just shot for you. And it's personalized to him. And those people always come back and go, holy crap, thanks so much for doing that. That is amazing. You guys go way above and beyond. But the other aspect of that that's so cool is these people are writing our sales messages for us.

That's true.

Like these, these questions that are coming up, those become objections that we put on our sales messages that we use in our emails. The, the feedback they give or of, you know, it would be way easier if this happened or this happened or you did it this way. We use all of that feedback, you know, and, and for our traffic course. People ask questions about the traffic course and they might say, hey, do you teach how to do branding videos? No, but that's great feedback. Maybe we'll add that in next and we'll sell them on the fact that because you're interested in doing it and you want branding videos, maybe that'll be the next little tip video we throw in there.

So you're saying that listening to your customers and prospects actually is a useful part of marketing.

That's cool.

It blows me away.

A.

If people don't have live chat on their conversion pages. So on their checkout page at a minimum. But sales page, we usually try to do both of those. We're not gonna really put them on a blog post, but we'll put a link to start a, a messenger chat with us, which comes from Minichat. So it's a unique link, kicks them over a intro message that says something like, hey, do you have a. Hey, Bob, do you have a question about our traffic course? Fire me a message and I'll get back to you. That's simple as that. Every single thing starts out that way. And more often than not, you're all you're every day. I probably have 10 new chats going and that's without a bunch of pushing to the chats too. But it's just because it's an option and people just, I mean it's an easy way to get a sale. It's so cool, it's fun.

And we've been, we're insane optimizers. We use visual website optimizer, we use tons of different split testing tools and we're constantly optimizing and testing things and the data we get from these chats and from the, you know, the responses people give on these videos is just like a system to gather objections to handle in our sales message and a shit ton of them turn into testimonials too.

Actually really quick thing, this isn't a live chat but this is the whole sales and looking at your customers is. Remember I took a screenshot of ThriveCart buyers, people who bought ThriveCart through us and Mike Michalowicz was one of those guys, the profit first Clockwork author and that's how we're getting him on the podcast, we're getting on his podcast. And that was just, I mean that one he didn't get through live chat but it was us looking, always looking at who's buying our stuff, following up with those folks even after the sale to make sure that they are taken care of. Maybe there's a cross sell opportunity because like there's always a way to connect your products and you best way to do that is just reach out maybe shoot them a loom video and thank you for their purchase. Like that's something I want to start doing is more stuff on the back end now. So it's like hey I want to.

Just shoot a look at BombBomb for that by the way. BombBomb Bomb Bomb B OMB. So it allows you, it's an app on your phone and your desktop and it allows you to take a quick little video. This is like an in person video. You're not doing screen share I don't think but an in person video and there's all these automations and stuff. But what it'll do is I might just hold up my phone or I'll get on my, on my laptop and just say hey, hey Joe, thanks for.

Thanks for buying this product. I hope you get a lot out of it. Let me know if you have any questions and then I can have it automatically send to you. But what bombbomb will do is it'll and it'll integrate with your email so it'll send it out but it'll automatically create a little gif, gif, jif, whatever. Is it GIF or gif?

I always say gif.

It creates a little GIF of you, like talking, and then it implants it in the email. And then whenever they click it, you'll know if they open the email, if they clicked it, and if they watched the video. And then you can set up automations.

That say if they did this, if this, then that.

Yeah, if this and that. Now, technically you could do that also in stuff like Kartra, but it's in other things, but it takes a little more time. Bombbomb is set up specifically for that.

Perfect.

And if you see. For instance, do you get notifications on your cell phone?

All the time.

Okay, cool. So like, of a sale?

Oh, certain cases, yeah.

Do you get notifications on your cell phone?

No, not at all. No one calls me.

But you know who gave me this idea was our mutual friend Michael o' Neill from Solopreneur Hour. So he said whenever he gets a. So you can't do this if you're selling thousands of products a day. But if somebody buys his course, he'll get on and I don't know if he uses Bombbomb yet, but he should. And he'll see it. He'll just pull out his phone and do a quick little video. Hey, I saw you buy this. Thanks. Hope you like it. And then he just manually emails it.

To them and he mentions their name or everything.

Actually, he texts it to him. So he says there's a. And I'll have to reach out to him to find out what it is. But there's an app that allows you to kind of to have a free text message number. So it's not your cell phone. They don't have your cell phone. But it's a secondary text line, like Twilio. It's not Twilio, but it's maybe something like that. But it's very easy. It's on your phone and it's easy to do. So he'll text it to them because he'll see their phone number in their thing. He'll text him, hey, I just saw you bought my course on how to be cool.

That's cool.

And thank you very much. And he goes, oh, my God. It just generates so much rapport.

And he does mention their name.

Right?

He does say like, hey, it's very personal.

Yeah, it's not. It's not.

Yeah, yeah.

James Schramko does that with his. His membership.

When we joined, his membership Immediately, it was like that day on a Sunday. I believe James, like, he was at the mall or something.

Even if you're getting like 20 or 30 sales a day, that's not hard to do. Just. No, I mean, because that's like, if each video is 20 seconds long, it's nothing.

What you do is you create a video that has, like, your message and then you just. You make a little two second video that says, hey, Brad, and then you just tack it. You're like wearing totally different clothes in the second half of the video.

That's like, more work than it has to be.

Way more.

It's a great idea though.

But no, we'll make it have to do that.

That personal touch works, though.

It's amazing.

Or what you do is the new iPhone thing where, like, you look like a unicorn that's talking.

Dude.

I'm actually. I've started sending text messages now because of that facial recognition thing. Like, it'll be a poop emoji and I'll be like, responding to people as a poop and they're like, what? Oh, that's Joe. Okay.

I would have thought personally I would recognize it in a heartbeat.

Yeah, totally, Joe. Take me long pile of.

That's awesome.

Go ahead, man.

All right, so my. My tactic tip actually comes from a mutual friend of all of ours, Kurt Molly. Hopefully he doesn't mind that I share this, but we're having him on the show soon, so he'll probably share it on the show again.

He's already been on my show, you know.

Did he share the Hot seven? Did he talk about that?

He did.

Okay, so I'm gonna mention the Hot 7 because that thing has been working insane. So one of the. One of the feedback. The comments that we've been getting a lot lately from people is, holy crap, you guys are every. Everywhere I'm seeing you everywhere I get on Facebook and it's like a different video. You guys must be like shooting 10 videos a day because I can't get rid of you.

Million dollar budget, right?

This is. This is the power of the Hot 7 technique that Kurt teaches. And essentially what it is. And I could totally butcher it, but this is how I'm using it is you create a whole bunch of audiences in Facebook. This is a Facebook ad tactic. You create a whole bunch of audiences in Facebook of people who have engaged with you in the last seven days. So you have anybody who's visited your website in the last seven days, Anybody who's liked any of your Facebook posts in the last Seven days. Anybody who's purchased your product in the last seven days and on and on and on. And you make like 20 different Hot 7 audiences of people who have interacted in the last seven days. And then when you make little videos, like social media videos, you boost them for $1 per day. That's it, just one buck per day. And you target this Hot 7 audience. And so anybody who visits your website now, when they get on Facebook, all of a sudden they're seeing 10 different videos from you. Anybody who likes one of your posts on Facebook or likes one of your ads on Facebook, all of the sudden they're seeing videos from you everywhere. And you can use this Hot 7 audience too, when you have offers to sell. So when you have an offer and you want to go after some low hanging fruit, these are your most recently engaged people, you put those offers in front of the Hot 7. But just that little tactic of creating these audiences of people who have engaged on your website, your Facebook fan page, your Instagram, any of that in the last seven days, and then targeting them with all of your videos, all of your blog posts, all of your podcast episodes, everything thing for a dollar a day, it just blows up your brand like absolutely overnight. It's insane how effective it is. And you can do this for, you know, obviously it depends on how many dollar a day ads you're setting up, but like 20 bucks a day and you're everywhere.

So with that, and to back it up, what were the numbers you just shared with me Friday? I think you're like, check out the 30 day numbers based off of this strategy right here.

So when you're inside the Facebook ad dashboard, most people look at impressions, right? They look at how many times is this admin scene? Impressions isn't a number I really care that much about because what impressions is, is if somebody sees it three times, one person, that counts as three impressions. But there's another number in the Facebook ads that I think you have to turn on. I don't know if it's on by default, which is reach and reaches. How many people have seen your ad? So if somebody sees it five times, that counts as one person in reach, right? And so I actually ran the numbers of how many people have viewed our videos in the last seven days. We were at about what, 149,000 people.

Oh, that was only seven days, was it?

Maybe I did 30. I don't remember what screenshot I sent you.

Really?

That's good.

Even 30 I'm happy with.

Okay, so it might have been 30 days. I don't remember exactly what I showed Joe, but so within, let's just call it a 30 day period. Our Facebook videos, our blog post, pretty much all of our ads that we're running on Facebook have been seen by 150,000 people and we were paying 3 cents a view.

It's.

Yeah, that's ridiculous. That's a. Yeah. And Kurt and I went into that whole paradigm shift quite a bit, which is a topic for a whole nother episode, but which you can get on bacon wrap business.

Go get it.

But and soon on our.

The sweet. Just the idea that stop just thinking about what's my click through rate? Like what's my cost per click? But it's like, what, what's, what's the cost to get somebody to view most or all of my content? And then it's all of a sudden you start thinking, wow, it only cost me 50 cents to get somebody to watch a 10 minute video.

Yeah. And you know, and what's interesting too is, you know, you're, you're making these videos and actually just kind of lost where I was gonna go with that. But you're basically, you pay like, yeah, sorry, my brain's fried. I got a new puppy. I haven't been sleeping lately.

Excuses.

I was gonna say is like, I really wish I was in a fucking band right now where I could use these strategies because we were in bands back in the day, right?

We could make a lot of money.

I'm serious though. Like, you could get so much exposure with knowing just some little things like this to get in front of your target audience. Like, I don't know, I just, I just think of that and I'm not going to go that route now, but go ahead.

Maybe that jogged your memory. So we're, we're running these for a buck a day, right? So you set up one of these things like one of these videos and we put it out there for a buck a day. And what Facebook's going to do is they're going to try to get you as many views for that buck as possible. So you can do the same concept with like 10 bucks a day, but it won't be as effective because Facebook goes, cool, now we have more money to play with, right? But if you go and set this at like a buck a day for these ads and you target this Hot 7 audience, you're getting like 23 cent video views and all of a sudden you're getting, you know, 150,000 people have seen your stuff.

Bingo.

And here's what most people don't realize, and this was a conversation we dove deep with Billie Jean on, was that the brand is so much more impactful than most people think. There was a time in the marketing, Internet marketing space where people went, branding is bullshit. Don't focus on branding, it's a waste of time. We've, we've found quite the opposite, that branding has actually been more impactful for us than a lot of the direct response stuff we're doing, because branding makes everything so much easier. So if we're seen by 150,000 people and people are just seeing us everywhere, if you get into our ecosystem, them. And in the last, you've seen like seven videos from us and they're like, these guys are fun. These guys are cool. They're goofing off, they're teaching me stuff. This is awesome. I love these guys. Now when I put an offer in front of you, you're gonna, you're gonna be a lot more likely to buy because you've, you've been seeing us everywhere. So if I'm, if I'm selling you on a traffic course and I put an offer in front of you that says buy our traffic course, you're probably gonna be thinking, well, this traffic course is probably pretty good because I see these fucking guys everywhere doing it. That's the power of branding. That's the power of these branding campaigns of like these 3 cent views. And we're getting in front of 150,000 people. Well, now that's 150,000 people that now know who we are when we put an offer in front of them. And we're that much more likely to make the sale.

Well, and what I talked about a minute ago with the tactics that's working for me, which is that content framework of what content to create, it's with this exact same thing in mind. Because if we know that snackable micro content that builds your brand and educates your audience is what works. Okay, well, okay, well, what, what content do we have to create to reverse engineer to make that happen?

And that's, I mean, I've talked to a lot of people on the phone and live chat and almost everybody listens to our podcast. They've seen our videos, they've seen our ads for different affiliate products too. And it's always in, it's great to hear this because it's confirmation and this is part of talking to your customers too, is you'll learn the stuff that's actually working because a lot of this you can't Track every single one of these video. We are starting to with the wicked reports, but that's a slower game. But it's just really cool to actually talk to someone and they're like, dude, I listen to every one of your episodes. Or hey, I love thrivecart. I found it from you. I see your ads everywhere for that. I'm like, yep. All right. There you go.

My favorite thing to hear is when I get messages from people that are like, holy crap, you guys must be spending millions because I'm seeing you everywhere. It's like, nah, I spent a buck just get in front of you.

Or less.

Less.

Much less.

Yeah.

It's amazing how that works.

Good stuff.

It's so cool. Well, I think we covered everything for show.

I think first success, first hustle wrap bacon chart.

Yeah. Was that high fiving the audience?

Sure. Yeah. Boom.

There we go.

Thank you for listening and thanks for listening.

Obviously you are a subscriber to bacon wrap business, but not to hustle and flowchart. Go smash the subscribe button over there.

And vice versa, of course.

Vice versa. And if you guys want to get a hold of me, you can always reach out to me directly@askbradakenratbusiness.com and I don't know if you guys.

We don't want to talk to people.

I know Matt doesn't. Joe.

Mike, fire me an email, man. I don't care. Joe. Evergreenprofits.com first time I've ever actually put it out there.

So based on the fact that Your email is jodevergreenprofits.com do you think people could get a hold of me if they wanted to?

Where do you think is it you don't to talk to Matt.

Exactly.

I'm just the dick, apparently.

Yeah.

So we going to do this again sometime, I think. Of course.

Let's. It's going to be another month or so, huh?

Absolutely. So should we go out the way we came in?

All right, everybody, thanks so much for listening to Hustle wrapped lowchart with bacon on the side. It was a great episode. Thanks for Brad for joining us. Thanks to me and Joe for joining us. If you haven't already, go to bacon wrap business.com subscribe there and hustleandflowchart.com subscribe there.

That was perfect.

Bye.

Later.

Bye, Felicia.